Damage Control by Robert Dugoni Read Free Book Online

acts of violence are difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept, I’m afraid. We have officers taking statements from your brother’s neighbors to determine if anyone saw anything suspicious or out of the ordinary—strangers walking around, a car that appeared out of place. The technicians found fingerprints in the house and shoe prints outside the back door. We’ll check to determine if there have been recent burglaries in the area. We’ll do our best to find out what happened and see if we can make some sense of it.”
    “Ms. Hill?” Dana turned to a different voice. A man wearing blue hospital scrubs and a white smock stood in the hallway. “We’re ready for you now.” Dana stood. The man looked past her, down the hallway. “Is there anyone here with you?”
    “No,” she said softly. “I’m alone.”
    Logan stood from the bench. “I’ll go in with you.”
    T HE H ILL FAMILY home in Medina was a five-bedroom house on an acre of well-manicured lawn, hedges, rhododendrons, and tulips. The backyard sloped gently from a pool to the edge of Lake Washington. Dana parked in front of the three-car garage to the left of the home, where the car could not be seen from the house. She sat undetected and wished she could remain there forever. She couldn’t, of course. Nor could she break down in hysterics or collapse from the pain and agony that felt like someone was standing on her chest. She had a job to do. She had to deliver bad news again. That was her job in life, delivering bad news. She had been the one to tell her mother when her father died. James had been out of town. She had told them both the story that her father’s law partner implored her to tell—that her father collapsed during a racquetball game at the Washington Athletic Club and died on the way to the hospital. That her father had been at his secretary’s condominium drinking his lunch and lying on top of her when he died was deemed irrelevant, a fact that would only serve to hurt her mother.
    The image of her brother’s battered and distorted face haunted her, and she knew it would continue to do so for many years. The doctors had done their best to clean him up. She tried not to consider what he’d looked like before they did. His face was swollen and bruised, a strange maroon and purple color. His eyes were thin slits, as if he were peeking out from a deep sleep. His face was so foreign to her that Dana had hoped that it wasn’t her brother after all, though that hope had been fleeting.
    “I need to see his hand,” she said.
    “Which one?” the medical examiner asked.
    “His left.”
    She walked around the tray table to the left side. On the pinky finger, at the tip, was the odd-shaped mole, the same mole she bore on the same finger of her left hand. It looked like Saturn, a planet with a ring around it. As kids, she and James would swear secrecy by pushing those two moles together. It was James’s mole. It was her mole. It was their mole.
    No mistake. “It’s James,” she said.
    Somewhere down the street, the McMillans’ beagle barked the mournful wail of an old, tired dog. Dana remembered when he was a puppy. What would she tell her mother this time to temper the bad news? What would lessen the pain of a mother’s loss of a child? What else to say but “Mom, James is dead. Someone killed him. I don’t know why, and why doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”
    “Oh, God.” Dana covered her mouth. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She felt herself coming unglued again and gripped the steering wheel, her body racked with sobs.
    Then the infrastructure collapsed, and she cried long, sorrowful heaves.
    M ORNING PASSED. The blanket of gray gave way to a blue sky with rolling white clouds. A chill remained—spring fighting the lingering winter. Dana stepped along the stone path amid the lambent shadows from the pine and dogwood trees swaying in a light breeze. She passed the Dutch door to the pantry off the kitchen. It had